most influential advisers to the Penta- gon, told an audience not long ago that, with a successful invasion of Iraq, "we could deliver a short message, a two- d C'\T' , " wor message: loure next. The Middle East is rife with regimes that support, each in its own way; danger- ous and destabilizing terrorist groups, fTom Hezbollah to AI eda. A stable, in- dependent, and:&ee Iraq-which will take years to achieve-might well exert a pow- erful influence. But if the invasion of Iraq emboldens American ideologues to the point of triumphalism and hubris, to the point where every world-transforming fantasy is to be proposed and indulged without brake, then those whose histor- ical analogy of choice was 1914 could prove to be possessed not only of a tragic view of life but also of a terrifYingly con- Vlncmg argument. The moral and political critics of a war in Iraq were surely correct to say that the worst consequence, beyond the thousands of lives lost, was the erosion of our rela- tions with many of our allies and their publics. There is hypocrisy everywhere (Russiàs lectures on the exercise of Amer- ican power seem hollow after the devas- tation of Chechnya), but it is long past the moment for debate, even with the French. The future is what counts. Some liberal internationalists, having seen the use of force come to a decent end in Ko- sovo and (finally) in Bosnia, supported this war. But among them, as among the opponents of the war, there has been a profound sense of anxiety that the Ad- ministration was recklessly indifferent to the imperfect but irreplaceable structures of international order built over sixty years. And now, in the language of Beltway strutting, are we really to "do" Syria or Iran? Recendy, in the pages of Policy Re- view-a conservative journal that is en- joying the vogue and influence in right- leaning circles that Commentary did in the nineteen-eighties-Ken Jowitt, a political-science professor who divides his time between the Hoover Institution and the University of California at Berke- ley; challenges a "magic bullet" scenario in which the toppling of Saddam will act as a regional democratic stimulus so power- ful that the Iranians will suddenly rise up against the ayatollahs, the autocrats of Egypt and Jordan will liberalize, and the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, "being an ophtha1mologist, will see the regional 62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21 & 28, 2003 writing on the wall." Jowitt is righdy du- bious of an ongoing evangelical adven- ture. He writes, "The magic bullet sce- nario effectively transforms and elevates a local, dangerous-but-mundane effort to remove a pathological killer, Saddam Hussein, into a successful democratic crusade that transforms the 'last' anti- modern, anti -democratic capitalist re- gion of the world: the Muslim Middle East. One might at least consider the fate of earlier Western crusades." In a report from Damascus in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar quoted Sayyid Abu Murtadah al-Yasiri, an Iraqi exile and cleric who fled Najaf twenty-three years ago, after his own reli- gious mentor, the grand ayatollah, was murdered by Saddam's men. AI- Yasiri said, "We are happy to be rid of injustice, but we fear the Americans' intentions." The lifting of that fear, and of similar fears throughout the Middle East, must be a prioritJ Americàs list of responsibilities in Iraq hardly ends with military conquest, and it leaves litde room for adventuring. Tens of thousands of soldiers will need to remain in Iraq long enough to prevent civil unrest or even civil war, while being vigilant against snipers, terror attacks, and guerrilla reprisals like last Thursday's suicide bomb- ing in Baghdad. Food, water, electricity; medicine, and other resources will need to be rapidly distributed. The production and flow of oil, the source of Iraqi wealth, will need to be maintained in a way that does not imply an occupier's exploitation. And then there is the question of helping to build a fTee state on the rubble of tyr- anny: To stage-manage a hasty election of surrogates and then beat a fast retreat would confirm suspicions of American inconstancy no less than the rapid eleva- tion of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Exxon Mobil as the titans of Iraqi industry: Amid the celebrations and the darker scenes of death and looting, the indelible image and photo op of the fall of Bagh- dad was the toppling of Saddam's statue on Firdos Square, an image that could not fail to echo the destruction of simi- larly forbidding icons in Moscow more than a decade ago. And yet that reso- nance should be deep and instructive: the initial fireworks blast of promise in Moscow soon setded down into years of painfùl transformation. In some of the states of the former Soviet Union, auto- crats still reign. "When smashing monu- ments," the Polish Holocaust survivor and satirist Stanislaw Lec once remarked, "save the pedestals-they always come in handy:" If the world is to escape such dark prophecies, the Bush Administra- tion will have to demonstrate the politi- cal skills to master a project it famously disdained: nation-building. To help cre- ate a liberal state following a military in- vasion is an enormously radical, and del- Icate, project. Here the prize is not power but something more elusive-legitimagr. There are many ways for the United States to press the case for peace and po- litical reform in the Middle East. A doc- trine of permanent revolution, however, brings to mind no analogies in history to comfort us. The phrase is Trotsky's, and the precedent is catastrophe. -David Remnick DOHA P05TCARD A CENTCOM STAR Æ"\ ;.. , , ,. -" . L ast week, when Tariq Ayoub, an AI Jazeera correspondent, was killed by an American air strike on the Arabic satellite channel's Baghdad offices, mili- tary officials at Central Command in Doha, tar, hastily drew up a news re- lease. ' ccording to commanders on the ground," the statement read, "Coalition forces came under significant enemy fire fTom the building ,where the AI Jazeera journalists were working and, consistent with the inherent right of self-defense, Coalition forces returned fire." Before releasing the statement to the media, a CENTCOM representative visited AI ]azeeràs cubicle in the Coalition Media Center to run it by Omar al- Issawi, a reporter and producer at the net- work. AI-Issawi, who was a friend of Ayoub, took a quick look at the release and was incensed. "This is not accept- able," he told the CENTCOM representa- tive. "I guarantee you there was no fire coming fTom our building." AI Jazeeràs offices, he noted later, were housed in a clearly marked two-story villa whose pre- cise coördinates had been provided to the Pentagon to avoid just such a tragedy: AI- Issawi was not suggesting, as many ob-